Business automation
10 Business Tasks You Can Automate
Ten specific, common business tasks that can be automated reliably — with what each one connects to and roughly how involved it is to build.
Generic automation advice is easy to nod along to and impossible to act on. So here are ten specific tasks, all of which I've built for real businesses, ordered roughly from quickest win to biggest project.
The list
1. Booking confirmations and reminders
Confirmation on booking, reminder before the date, follow-up after. Reduces no-shows immediately and takes almost no time to build.
2. Enquiry form to CRM and task
A form submission creates the record, assigns an owner and raises the follow-up task, so nothing depends on someone checking an inbox.
3. Invoice data into accounting
Supplier invoices read on arrival, figures extracted and pushed to Xero or similar instead of being typed in.
4. Payment chasing
Escalating reminders on overdue invoices, stopping automatically when payment lands.
5. Inbox classification
Mail sorted into enquiry, invoice, supplier and noise before anyone opens it.
6. Document filing
Attachments named to convention and filed against the right customer or job automatically.
7. Staff rota notifications
Schedule changes pushed to the people affected rather than posted and hoped for.
8. Weekly operational reporting
The numbers someone currently assembles by hand, generated and sent on a schedule.
9. Onboarding sequences
New customer or client setup running as a tracked sequence with automatic chasing on outstanding items.
10. Drafted replies to common questions
The twenty messages you send constantly, prepared for review with the details already filled in.
How to pick from this list
Count how many times each one happens in your business per week and multiply by the minutes it takes. Anything over an hour a week is worth costing out; anything over three is usually a straightforward decision.
Also weigh the failure cost, not just the time. Payment chasing is a modest time saving but a significant cash-flow one, because the automated version never gets forgotten during a busy fortnight.
One caveat
Automating a step is only worth it if the step is right. If a process has grown by accident, spend the first hour deciding what it should be rather than encoding what it currently is.
Related service
Business Automation